M. Antonietti, et al (Acta Polymer 1997, 48, 262) describes the chemical modification of styrene-butadiene-styrene copolymers, but their resulting materials were not used to prepare elastomeric printing plates.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,264,705 discloses a multilayered printing plate for flexographic printing prepared from unmodified elastomeric polymers. However, relief feature depths are very large precluding high resolution printing applications.
A variety of soft lithographic techniques have been developed for high resolution printing applications (US 2007/0098899; Xia, Y; Whitesides, G. M. Annu. Rev. Mater. Sci. 1998, 28, 153). However, these methods typically utilize mechanically fragile elastomeric stamps based on PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) and are not suitable for large scale reel-to-reel printing processes.
In contrast, the present invention is directed to an article comprising at least one layer an elastomeric polymer deposited on a substrate wherein the polymer is photoimagable and has been chemically modified to contain either hydrophobic fluoroalkyl side groups or hydrophilic hydroxyl side groups to provide differential wetting with hydrophilic inks.